20,000 film scenes now available on YouTube

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Movies

Google's YouTube has signed a deal with MovieClips.com to apparently replace the thousands of movie clips users have uploaded with authentic, licensed replacements.

The more than 20,000 licensed movie clips may be found at YouTube MovieClips, a partnership with the MovieClips.com site.

Using the company's proprietary technology, a team of Content Curators assigns up to 1,000 points of relevant data points to every scene relating to everything from action to mood to setting, and prop, the site said. "Our goal is to promote the discovery of movies," said MovieClips co-founder Richard Raddon, in a statement. "By making our clips accessible on the biggest video platform on the web, we unlock the power of movie clips to promote feature film purchase and rental."

What this means, then, is that users can search for "say hello to my little friend" and either see a number of clips on YouTube itself or the licensed, HD version of the climactic, violent conclusion to the Al Pacino classic, Scarface. It's worth noting that the clips on YouTube are just a few seconds long, while the Movieclips.com clip is 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

But the limited number of clips also means that users will have to search YouTube for the "Go ahead, make my day" quote from Sudden Impact. On the flip side, MovieClips archives a number of clips from The Blues Brothers and The Big Lebowski, two eminently quotable movies. Unfortunately, MovieClips made some odd navigational choices, such as searching for a movie, by letter, from within a YouTube video. A list of movies is also sometimes separated with featured films highlighted in blue and placed first, so that finding them on the page can be difficult.

However, the additional clips does make YouTube even more consumer- and Hollywood-friendly, with its recent top-tier Hollywood rentals program to complement the new additions. A recent report also claims that YouTube hogs 22 percent of the world's mobile bandwidth.

This article, written by Mark Hachman, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc.